The Southern strategy refers to:
... a purported Republican method of winning Southern states in the latter decades of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st century by exploiting opposition among the conservative South to the cultural upheaval of New Left, Vietnam protests, and the Hippie culture. Some analysts think widespread demographic shifts and the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 are signs that the Southern strategy is declining in significance.
The election of Barack Obama as president does indicate something, but the Southern strategy is not in decline. It has just gotten a new face: Southern Strategy 2.0.
Wikipedia attributes the first use of the Southern strategy to Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips, who said in a 1970 New York Times article:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Kevin Phillips may have been the first proponent of the strategy, but it was Lee Atwater who made it the foundation of the current Republican party. Atwater told Alexander P. Lamis:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964... and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps...?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "(epithet deleted), (epithet deleted), (epithet deleted)." By 1968 you can't say "(epithet deleted)"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "(epithet deleted), (epithet deleted)".
How is this different from what we are hearing from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, the de facto leaders of the Republican party, and the teabaggers? The teabaggers don't talk about states' rights, cutting taxes, and balancing the budget so much. They compare Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler and claim that he was born in Africa. They portray the President of the United States of America as a witch doctor. They compare Democrats to Nazis and describe them as socialists. They scream about how any kind of government sponsored health care is unconstitutional. They attend 'tea parties' armed. Some carry signs saying that they are unarmed, this time. They want their country back.
Glenn Beck said that Barack Obama is a racist who has a "a deep seated hatred for white people." Limbaugh says America is "so multicultured and fractured" that it "may be two or three different countries" and that Obama "is racism."
Rash Lardball's latest diatribe includes a call for "segregated buses." Commenting on an incident involving three high school students fighting over a seat on a school bus, he said, "I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America."
When called on their race baiting, they are outraged.
Discussing Limbaugh's commentary, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok, said:
...yesterday, Rush Limbaugh was on the air talking about an incident in which black kids attacked a white kid on a school bus, an incident the police said was not racially motivated, and saying that what we need are segregated buses, that this is the only way, I suppose, that white people can be protected from black people. I think when we have characters like Limbaugh saying that on the air to millions of Americans, many of whom actually revere the man, you know, it's not surprising that people feel that, you know, the race war is around the corner and that we're allowed to say these kinds of things."
Former president Jimmy Carter said in an interview earlier this week:
I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American. I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that shared the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans.
And that racism inclination still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama doesn't believe people are judging his polices based on the "color of his skin." A Democratic strategist who advised Bill Clinton said that the most strident opposition to Obama is not about race; it is about "a desire to discredit Obama's entire presidency because conservatives consider him too liberal."
Indeed, there are those who oppose Obama's agenda because they think it is too liberal. But one can't discount the fact that two leading conservative voices have made numerous remarks that can't be misinterpreted. They are playing to the base. They would not keep saying those kind of things if there wasn't something to it.
The Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged that political discourse is deteriorating. The department produced a report titled, "Right-Wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," which included a warning that the election of an African-American president could incite right-wing groups to violence.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a news conference:
I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this ... I saw this myself, in the late '70s in San Francisco. This kind of rhetoric was very frightening, and it created a climate in which violence took place.
(...)
I wish that we would all ... curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, so that understanding that some of the people - the ears that it is falling on, are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume.
The rhetoric is very frightening. What is worse is that it is part of a strategy. We have seen it before, in a somewhat milder form, in the Southern strategy 1.0.